I have felt loss. I have felt sadness. But worse than either of these, I think, was my dismay the first time I was sick from alcohol.

There I am, aged 14-ish, sitting on a bed in a dormitory at a Scottish public school, drinking a 1.5 litre bottle of Irn-Bru with a quarter-bottle of vodka in it. I'm in a kilt, and a hurry too, because the coach is about to leave to take us all to a céilidh at a nearby girls' school. Oh yes, this is gritty stuff. Boys swallowing toothpaste, stashing cigarettes in their sporrans, throwing bottles under their beds and running off down the corridor. I do the same.

And then, as I am quite fortuitously passing the toilets, I feel an unfamiliar sensation. You might call it a heaving. Into a cubicle, down on to my knees, and it all comes out. All of it. Still translucent orange. Still fizzy. Precious amber, splashing into the pan. Such a sense of waste. It had barely been inside me for ten minutes. I remember wishing that I had a jug, so I could drink it again. Yes, I know. Teenage boys are grim.

I remember that whole dance pretty well, in fact. Possibly because it was the only one that I - or almost anyone I knew - ever did sober. My school was drug-free, pretty much, but it was booze-heavy. Lordy, it was awash with the stuff. I blame all those farm kids from the Scottish Borders. We were an indolent bunch, by and large, but it was amazing the effort and ingenuity that we put into that. Fake IDs, padded bags thrown over walls, midnight shopping excursions down drainpipes, all of it. It was like The Great Escape in reverse. If a 13-year-old boy had a broken voice and stubble, that boy could make a fortune.

So yes, that was my first alcohol vomit, and it was such a common experience at the time (17 years ago, now) that I can never understand why youthful binge-drinking is supposed to be a recent phenomenon. I couldn't tell you exactly when I first got drunk, but it was at around the same time.

I can, however, tell you this - it didn't happen in a pub. Nobody gets drunk for the first time in a pub. Not for years. This is Britain. We learn in car parks and at bus stops, on park benches and at under-supervised sleep-overs. Pubs are the exact opposite of what the teenage binge-drinker is after. They are thronged with adults, imbued with etiquette and, increasingly, really quite expensive.

Suddenly, I'm wondering why. For the last few months, there has been a steady stream of stories about pubs going to the wall. Yesterday, The Guardian reported that “one of Britain's oldest, most resilient industries is in a dire state”. They reckoned four pubs close every day. The Daily Express, last week, spun that as one every six hours. The Campaign For Real Ale says that 57 pubs close each month, the British Beer and Pub Association says 27 shut each week, and even the International Herald Tribune has noticed, citing more than 1,000 in a year.

If I had a regular pub, where I could wander in and speak to people that I actually knew, a bit like the Queen Vic, I'm sure that we could all enjoy a merry half-hour trying to establish whether all these figures matched up. But I don't. Does anybody? Blame tax hikes, or the smoking ban, or whatever you like, but the local pub is on the way out.

Another story from yesterday. In the first of what is billed as a national crackdown on teenage street drinking, across the February half-term holiday police seized the equivalent of 45,000 pints from 5,000 children. That works out as nine pints per teenager. At the closest thing I have to a local pub - in a relatively unpretentious bit of North London - nine pints would set me back the best part of £30. At the over-priced Tesco garage just around the corner, it would be more like a tenner.

Alcohol used to be something that we primarily bought in pubs and drank in pubs. Now we primarily buy it in shops and drink it at home. Or, if we are too young to have a home, we drink it wherever we can. I don't mean to ignore the great, sweaty booze palaces that make our city centres such a horrid nightmare of shrieking and midriffs, but they are a symptom, not a cause. So, if the British public are going to drink and drink, (and we are), and if Gordon Brown is going to shamelessly exploit this as an opportunity for tax revenue (and he is), why doesn't he indulge in some of that Stalinist social engineering of which he is famously so fond? If you want to get drunk, your local pub is your most expensive option. Isn't this exactly wrong? Shouldn't it be the cheapest?

Maybe it is time for some brave thinking. Let us no longer tax pubs to destruction. Let us turn that thinking on its head, and have a pub subsidy. In fact, we could even call it a pubsidy. Let's get drinkers out of their homes, and down to their local.

Meet the neighbours. Form a community. Isn't Gordon supposed to be big on communities? It's a bit Soviet, true enough, but he shouldn't have a problem with that. Ask anybody, abroad, about British community life, and they will mention pubs. Gordon wants Britishness, and Britishness is drunkenness. So, let's do it together.

And, meanwhile, let us hit the supermarkets and off-licences with booze taxes you wouldn't believe. Let the price rises in Oddbins put a Zimbabwe grocery to shame. Could anything better curb the spread of teenage binge-drinking? Many of them will sneak into the pubs, true enough, but that's better than lapsing into a coma on a building site. We learn to binge-drink young, because it is cheap and easy, and because we can. We do it in secret huddled groups, in parks, alleyways and, yes, public school dormitories, and we learn to associate it with vomit and rebellion and being outside the fold. Which is odd, for something that almost everybody does. Isn't it?

Huq of a way to get noticed

My, but Konnie Huq has played it well, hasn't she? First she gets selected to run with the Olympic Torch (publicity), then she frets about it in relation to Tibet (more publicity), then she does it anyway (even more publicity), and then she complains about it afterwards (further publicity still). Top marks for effort.

Roll on, les flics

Mind you, jogging along amid that phalanx of Chinese security guards in their blue tracksuits can't have been pleasant. One thought of Princess Leia

in Star Wars, being led towards Darth Vader by a mob of Stormtroopers. Although, to be fair to them, they did keep up the pace. Our bobbies were on bikes, did you notice? Not so in Paris. Their Olympic procession was as wonderfully chaotic as our own, but I couldn't help but be impressed by their Rollerblading policemen. Apparently, they had a 100.

I repeat: Paris has at least 100 Rollerblading policemen. Think about that.

In fact, further research reveals that Paris has had Rollerblading policemen since 1998. They glide around, clearing bus lanes and scolding drivers for using phones. They even carry guns. Only the French could manage this. It's like a pop video by the Village People.

Entranced, I called the Metropolitan Police to see if London had any policemen trained to use Rollerblades. And guess what? We do. We have four. Or rather, we trained four in 2000 to police London's parks. Two of them weren't very good at it and soon gave up. The other two stuck at it for a couple of months, but eventually swapped their blades for bicycles. According to a BBC report, they had “problems chasing people on grass”. It's too depressing for words.

Times Recommends

• Tear down this wall! And save the planet
• Double click if you want the bin emptied
• Have you got permission to read this?